We are strongly supporting Appeals Court District 4 Presiding Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg for Wisconsin Supreme Court. Kloppenburg has an exceptional professional background and the kind of temperament that’s needed on this court.
As we all know, the Wisconsin Supreme Court used to be very well respected by legal experts across the country. Now, thanks to some recent elections of justices with some very serious ethical shortcomings among the conservative majority, Wisconsin’s highest court has a very dubious reputation and few admirers. The situation is so bad that a Supreme Court justice can try to choke a colleague and simply get away with it. Even worse, the court isn’t doing much to raise the ethical standards for judges and justices around the state. It seems the right-wing majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court doesn’t want to tighten ethical regulations for fear that they will have to live up to them. With the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision of Citizen’s United, dirty special interest money is now buying our elections by flooding the airwaves with nasty and often untrue negative campaign ads.
Enter JoAnne Kloppenburg, the Shepherd’s pick for a 10-year term on the bench. As you may recall, Kloppenburg ran for Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2011 and narrowly lost in a recount against Justice David Prosser. Just a month later, Prosser attempted to choke Justice Ann Walsh Bradley in her own office, with almost all of the justices witnessing his deplorable actions. Prosser was never disciplined and since that time, the court has become more dysfunctional and, unfortunately, more ethically challenged. The result is a very divided court where the conservative majority seems to make their decisions based on how they will benefit their campaign contributors and cronies, not the settled law in the state. Again, Wisconsin used to have one of the model supreme courts in our country.
Wisconsin voters can make things right and begin restoring the court’s integrity by voting for JoAnne Kloppenburg on April 5. Kloppenburg won a seat on the District 4 Appellate Court in 2012, giving her even more experience she can use as a Supreme Court justice. Previously, she worked as a prosecutor and litigator and was an assistant attorney general in the Wisconsin Department of Justice and served under both Republican and Democratic attorneys general. Earlier in her career, Kloppenburg was a university administrator, developed a food stamp program for low-income women and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana.
|
|
We believe that Kloppenburg will be a fair and impartial judge who will respect all parties in each case and make decisions based on the law, not on political cronyism. That is how she functioned on the appeals court.
That stands in stark contrast to Kloppenburg’s opponent on April 5, Interim Justice Rebecca Bradley, who is viewed as one of the least ethical justices to serve on the Wisconsin Supreme Court—and that’s saying something. Rebecca Bradley owes her entire judicial career to Gov. Scott Walker, the Republican Party and conservative dark-money groups, such as Wisconsin Club for Growth. Rebecca Bradley sought this temporary position after she had declared her candidacy for the April election and Justice Patrick Crooks died in September. She never should have sought this appointment while she was running for the office and Walker never should have made this appointment. Most legal experts argue that an interim justice, who was not running for the office, should have been appointed.
This is the third time that Walker has appointed Rebecca Bradley to a judicial position. We have to wonder why he believes she is a fair and responsible jurist, because from what we’ve seen, Rebecca Bradley is a right-wing ideologue cloaked in a judicial robe. She has aligned herself with powerful conservatives throughout the community and has risen like a rocket through the state’s court system through Walker’s appointments. She continues to embrace extreme conservatives, such as Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, Lieutenant Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, WTMJ talker Charlie Sykes and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Thanks to the revelations by a watchdog group, One Wisconsin Now, we now know that Rebecca Bradley showed terrible judgment when, as a Marquette University senior, she published bigoted screeds against the LGBTQ community, those living with HIV/AIDS, rape survivors, feminists and those who don’t share her ultra-right-wing views. More recently, as a corporate attorney. in 2006 she wrote an op-ed supporting a pharmacist’s right to deny a woman doctor-prescribed birth control and espouses the erroneous view that equates contraception with abortion. How on earth could someone expect to receive a fair and impartial hearing in her court when her opinions are so extreme and downright dangerous?
Rebecca Bradley has gone through the motions of apologizing since the revelations, but her apologies are more self-serving than sincere. Rebecca Bradley needs to be removed from the Wisconsin Supreme Court as soon as possible. Since she won’t heed calls to resign, we are asking that you vote for JoAnne Kloppenburg on April 5 to begin to restore integrity on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
